Being Jim Davis

Heraclitus’s “table fragments” raise puzzles about identity and persistence: under what conditions does a side table persist through time as one and the same object? If the world contains things which endure, and retain their identity in spite of undergoing alteration, then somehow those things must persist through changes. Heraclitus wonders whether one can view the same side table twice precisely because it continually undergoes changes. In particular, it changes compositionally. At any given time, it is made up of different component parts from the ones it was previously made up of. So, according to one interpretation, Heraclitus concludes that we do not have (numerically) the same side table persisting from one moment to the next.In this episode of Being Jim Davis, we examine Garfield's incomplete understanding of biology, the strange life of Jon Arbuckle's orphan side table, and the surprising versatility of the onomatopoeia 'poomp.'Today's strip